Update: ESEA co-founder Craig "Torbull" Levine has responded with a more official statement, posted to the ESEA news page. He admits they were testing Bitcoin integration, to "determine whether it was a feature that we might want to add in the future." Ultimately, Torbull says, they decided against it.

He goes to claim that "an employee who was involved in the test has been using the test code for his own personal gain since April 13, 2013."

"The owners and management at ESEA all apologize to each of you that were impacted by the recent events and intend to make things right," Torbull continues. "ESEA has issued a free month of ESEA Premium to all of our community members who were enrolled in Premium for the month of April. We also ask anyone who has experienced any physical damage to their computers to open an ESEA support ticket.

"In an effort to maintain complete transparency, we have released all of the Bitcoin wallet addresses as well as data dumps of the wallets themselves. The value of the mined Bitcoins was $3,713.55 and ESEA will be donating 100% of the $3,713.55 to the American Cancer Society. ESEA will also match 100% of this amount for a total of $7,427.10 donated. ESEA is also increasing the Season 14 League prize pot by $3,713.55."

Original Story: Multiplayer eSports network ESEA was found to have malware in its anti-cheat client, which used users' graphics cards to mine for Bitcoins. Information about the exploit was posted to the ESEA's forums by user "ENJOY ESEA SHEEP", who found he had been unwittingly farming Bitcoins for someone in the community after noticing excessively high idle GPU usage.

Mining is the legitimate, and deliberately system-intensive process of adding transaction records to Bitcoin's public ledger - generating Bitcoins for the miner in the process. The ESEA client had been pooling the GPUs of users in order to generate more money for wallets held by ESEA staff.

ESEA co-founder Eric ‘lpkane’ Thunberg responded to the accusation, initially claiming it was a mistakenly released April Fool's joke. His first statement is kind of amazing:

"Lol that got aggressive quickly.

"Back towards the end of march, as BTC was skyrocketing, Jaguar and I were talking about how cool it would be if we could use massive amounts of GPUs logged into the client to mine.

"We went back and forth about it, considered doing something for April fools, didn't get it done in time, and eventually elected to put some test code in the client and try it on a few admin accounts, ours included.

"We ran the test for a few days on our accounts, decided it wasn't worth the potential drama, and pulled the plug, or so we thought.

"Fast forward to 48 hours ago, a fuck up in the client server results in a restart which results in a setting getting changed which enables it for all idle users, and here we are."

Thunberg claimed the combined efforts of ESEA users' unaware mining netted them roughly 2BTC, or $280, which he promised would be put towards the Season 14 prize pot.

He returned with a second statement a few hours later, after users pointed out that anti-viruses had been flagging the client for longer than the claimed 48 hours. He admits the mining had been part of the client since 14th April, and that the overall money mined totaled $3,602.21, before going to say:

"So first the bad news, this is way more shady than I originally thought, and as the person who is ultimately responsible for everything it's 100% my fault.

"Now the good news, as of the client update released in the last hour, all the BTC stuff is out which should solve the GPU and AV warnings."

Thunberg once again promised to use the now substantially higher total as part of the Season 14 prize pot, and that - as recompense for the additional strain that's been placed on user's GPUs - would gift a free one month Premium code for Premium account holders. He finished by saying, "once again, our bad, thanks for keeping us honest."

- Reduced cl_radar_scale minimum from 0.4 to 0.25.- Fixed a problem where workshop maps included in Operation Payback weren't playable on community servers without Operation Payback Pass.- Fixed a problem where Operation Payback banner could sometimes show up over friends in Play With Friends lobby.- Added an explanation to Operation Payback Pass to indicate that Operation Payback is a mapgroup for Classic Casual mode.

[ OPERATION PAYBACK ]- Uploaded Operation Payback,  a Classic Casual map group made up of seven top-rated Workshop maps on official servers- Allowed players to invite friends to play OP even if they havent purchased- Added upgradeable challenge coin, viewable in avatar, that progresses from bronze to silver to gold with play

[ RADAR ]- Spectators' radar was replaced with a minimap, allowing for better orientation and action-following without resorting to the overview.- When playing competitive or with sv_competitive_official_5v5 set, the minimap will show player hotkey values like the overview map does.- Added convar cl_radar_always_centered ( default 1 ) then when set to 0 makes more efficient use of the radar at the expense of moving the POV away from the center.- Added 2 options to the radar, allowing players to change the scale and orientation. These are exposed in the Game Settings menu, or directly with the cl_radar_scale ( default 0.7 ) and cl_radar_rotate ( default 1 ) convars, respectively.- Added convar cl_radar_icon_scale_min ( default 0.6 ) that allows radar icons to be kept large when the scale is reduced.- Moved the planted bomb icon from below the radar to the timer.- Fixed radar showing above or below on a player when spectating them from chase.

[ CS:GO PLAYER PROFILE ] - All players can now view other players medals/coins on the in-game Player Profile page.- Friends can now view your wins and Skill Group on your in-game Player Profile page.- You can now view a Player's Profile page by hitting Z (the Command Radio Message key) when spectating that player.- Added a shortcut to view a friend's CS:GO Player Profile page from the main menu friends list.

[ MISC ]- Added "Disable Autogenerated DM Spawns?" to info_map_parameters entity that allows mapper to specify that no dm spawns should be autogenerated and will be mapper-placed instead.- Added more options for map filtering in server browser:&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp-The default map filter now performs substring matching. (dust will find de_dust2_se, cs_dustyhouse, workshop or fastdl versions of maps, etc.)&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp-A single slash will search for a prefix in the base map name. (/cs will search for all hostage rescue maps)&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp-An asterisk will search for a map name suffix. (*_se will search for any map ending in "_se")&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp-A double slash will search for an exact map name prefix. (///125488374/ will search for the official workshop de_dust2_se. ///official will search for all official workshop non-se maps)- Added support for official cs_militia map workshop id 133256570 to be played as part of dedicated servers workshop collection mapcycle.

Opportunities for misdirection maneuvers are less common in multiplayer shooters, so I'm compelled to highlight this absurdly creative flashbang feint I spotted on the ESEA YouTube channel from last weekend's ESEA S13 LAN in Dallas.

The setup: two teams whittle each other down to a one-on-one scenario around bomb site A on de_dust2. Watch how Swag (Team Dynamic) handles KennyS (VERYGAMES) after the bomb plant.

If you’re in the middle of a game of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and suddenly get the urge to play Super Mario Bros., there are a few options open to you. You could stop playing CS: GO. You could grab a nearby 3DS, perhaps yanking it from the hands of a passing four year-old, and balance it under your monitor, using a series of elaborate poking devices to manipulate the game. Or you could join Reflex Gamers’ CS: GO server, where they’ve created an emulated SNES within cs_office, complete with controllers and cartridges. You have to see this. (more…)

Reflex Gamers has made a brilliant addition to its 24/7 cs_office server for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive—the map now features the "Sourcemod Entertainment System" (SMES), a playable console which runs "Super Mareo Bruhs" on a TV in the projector room.

I just jumped into the server to check it out (video below), and it works as advertised, with support for two players and animated controller buttons. Someone even has to put the Super Mareo Bruhs cartridge into the SMES and turn it on to play. PC gaming: even the games in our games are high-fidelity.

You can play Super Mareo Bruhs yourself on Reflex's cs_office server, which lives at 74.201.57.168. The plugin's coder, Pray and Spray, deserves a barrage of internet high-fives for this feat.

- Fixed a bug where a player who joined team during halftime pause would not correctly switch teams together with teammates for the second half.- Fixed auto team balancing code to not move players to other team during official competitive match after several players on one team abandoned the game.- Added hostage spawn location indices to round backup files.- Fixed loser money not restoring correctly from round backups at halftime.- Fixed an exploit on de_vertigo.- Added Macedonia country flag (MK)

- If CTs rescue a hostage and win game now plays "Hostage has been rescued" announcement before announcing "Counter-Terrorists Win".- Hostages now correctly drop to ground when hostage carrier was killed mid-air.- Menus will now correctly display on various resolution ratios including 5:4 and triple monitor- Friends panel will now display an invited icon for invited friends.- Fixed mouse input in demo playback .- Lobby leader is now highlighted in lobby.- Various layout changes to Lobby and Scoreboard.- Map makers can now choose to show a custom loading image in place of the map overview/radar image&nbsp&nbsp--To do this, place a .jpg image in the same directory as the .bsp (in maps) named _loading.jpg (it needs to be packed manually into the bsp before uploading to the workshop)- Fixed player viewmodel arms rendering inside out when cl_righthand was set to 0- Added back player_say game event for server plugins.

Valve has sent out a patch for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive that focuses on tweaking Hostage Rescue rules for stronger balance and to entice players away from the long-favored Bomb Defusal. Most notably, CTs have now adopted the tactical doctrine of draping hostages across their shoulders like a squishy scarf, and only a single rescue is needed to secure a win for the good guys.

You'll need to interact with a hostage for a lengthy four seconds to get him to hop on for a ride, and a new "rescue kit" shortens pickup time to a single second by presumably wowing hostages with attractively padded and comfortable-looking shoulder guards to rest on. Taking a note of influence from community-made maps such as cs_motel, hostage spawns are now randomized per match.

Valve is also continuing to stock GO's maps with updated versions of classic Counter-Strike levels, with cs_militia being the latest addition. It's structured similarly to cs_assault, where Ts benefit from an entrenched interior location to bunker in while CTs attempt rescue through multiple points of entry.

Defusing bombs got a small but significant change as well: turning too far away from a bomb while defusing it will cancel the process, a jump in risk and exposure for CTs trying for the win while Ts yet linger to guard the bomb. They could sure use one of those hostage-capes for extra protection.

Oh, and the rumored Support Pass for a community map rotation on official servers isn't happening. Valve even pokes fun at earlier reports of the pass with a new data string, "CSGO_Ticket_CommunitySeasonOneSpring2013_Leak," and its single-word description: "lol." Oh, Valve. Don't ever change.